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I would like to start off by saying that seeing the PM's market these past few weeks have started making me second guess my investments. I have about 70% of my wealth tied into physical gold and silver, and the other 30% held in cash savings. I am a twenty year old trying to plan for the unpredictable future, and any advice would be appreciated.

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I understand how you feel. I have about 90% of my liquid wealth in Gold & Silver. Hopefully when you bought it, you considered it a long term investment with money that you didn't need in the short term to pay bills. Otherwise you may be forced to sell before if pays off for you. If that's the case (long term view), then relax and you'll be fine. No manipulation lasts forever and remember we have powerful friends too (China & Russia), who I'm convince that when the time is right (i.e. they feel they have enough) will force the issue on the Comex and see their investment rise to it's full potential too.

I think most or ALL of the people on this board can feel your pain! Probably even Chris M.

A couple of things to consider:

1. The PMs will always have SOME value. Dollars may not. Stocks may not. Bonds may not. If you have money, you have to put it somewhere, and unless you are buying land, or commodities, you are at a fundamentaly risk of the system biting you in the butt.

2. Based on what has happend over the past 5 years, the past 5 months, and the past 5 days it is continuously getting easier to say: Something just DOESNT MAKE SENSE. These markets are sick. And something has got to give. How can companies keep losing money, yet watch their stock prices go up and up and up? How can the government keep running massive deficits, printing more money and still survive? I dont want to put my money in there, and the places I do have money in the market (... miners - UGH - talk about UGLY. Whew. Today was truly brutal, energy companies, etc) are linked to things that have intrinsic value. Not Facebook, and caprice like that.

3. If you have been reading what Chris has written (and listen to the great podcasts) he has repeatedly said that he thinks that Japan will be the first to go. And in fact, Japan has REALLY kicked things into high gear the past few weeks with the money printing. Gold has been sky high against the yen. That will make the euro and USD stronger. Then, the EU will go (Spain is RIGHT on the edge in my opinion...with Italy, France, and Greece to follow..) which will make the USD the only currency left (other than PMs which I consider to be cash, not an 'investment'). So the USD will rise. So in the sort to mid term (3, 6, 12 ??? months) things might actually get worse before they get better.

I think this interview by Chris is amazing. And I see that things are still moving in this direction...just more slowly that we all thought it would.

4. If for some reason ALL of us are wrong, then presumably the economy will continue to grow, and you will have opportunities for work in your future. You are young and smart and observant. That will take you far. I am not quite as all in as you, being at around ~40% in PMs. You should prepare for deflation as well as inflation, IMO (note that I am nowhere NEAR a finanacial planner...) but it just seems prudent to do this. Have some cash around to ensure that you can cover your bills for some period of time that you are comfortable with (for me that is at least 6 months...but that is me). If we have some huge deflation, your cash will be worth more. If we have major inflation, then your other investments will. If we remain in this pergatory that we have been for the past 2 years then....sigh!!!

Keep in mind that the relative amounts of most commodities remain fairly constant, therefore so do thier actual values, absent supply fluctuations (US corn drought) or emergence of new applications (embedding silver in fabric as a disinfectant). The ever changing prices are strictly the result of bank/gov't shenanigans, and the purchasing/trading value of silver or other commodities generally remains approximately constant. Obviously, long or unlimited shelf life items are better as a store of value, as are items whose industrial/commercial usefulness is increasing, such as silver. The wild swings in fiat value are merely proof that more is happening than currently meets the eye. ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!") Ultimately, ya pays yer money & ya takes yer choice. The difference is, if you acquire a commodity, PM or others, you can likely liquidate it for about the same amount of another commodity that you would have had to trade for it in the first place. One possible exception might be ammo, whose relative value to other hard goods is currently rising mightily... I hope this turns out to be another bubble, because if not, it's going to take lots more to constitute a lifetime supply... The USDollar is over and some don't know it yet, but when the stuff hits the fan we're gonna need all the cheap paper we can get to wipe up the mess. QE Infinity indeed...

Bottom line: Look to the security of your family/tribe, get/stay right with God, and keep your powder dry.

First of all, Zack, I agree that one is making a financially advantageous decision by storing savings in gold and silver. And if you are saving any money at all at age 20, then good for you, as I certainly wasn't at that age.

But, RPort, "an epic battle of good and evil?" Those of us, including me, who buy precious metals help drive the silver and gold price up and therefore either directly or indirectly fund miners that are poisoning water sources with mercury, destroying habitats, and removing wealth from poor nations with corrupt leaders and poor resource management policies.

I sure hope this isn't about good and evil, because if it is, then my high-school buddy who runs a non-profit river conservation organization outfit in Ecuador might conclude that I'm on the evil side. He has seen the environmental damage of PM mining with his own eyes, in watersheds he has been monitoring in person for 15 years. If you want his contact info, let me know and I'll send it to you.

I would suggest that, while we may not like money printing schemes and the malfesance of big finance, we are not really much different from them when viewed from the 2 billion people on the planet who are living hand-to-mouth. To people willing to accept 25 cents to pedal me one kilometer in a pedicab while wearing flip-flops, while baking under a tropical sun, big bankers and small time goldbugs like me may look like just about the same thing.

This is actually my only complaint about The Crash Course: it claims to be about responding to the three E's, but the focus in the book version, as well as here on this website is using information about the three E's in order to take action on the first E, by protecting/increasing one's wealth, with some environmental window dressing here and there. We in these groups, with some exceptions, have a somewhat different agenda then the members of 350.org, who are actively organizing in attempts to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Now, I am very sympathetic to the idea that if we don't first help ourselves we cannot later help others. There is a lot of clear thinking and excellent planning to be found here, and I am grateful for Chris' broad thinking and excellent teaching capacity. I certainly consider him one of the greatest thinkers and communicators on these broad issues. But my buddy in Ecuador was very clear about his preference for my investments: please don't invest in gold because it poisons local watersheds that indigineous people depend on as fisheries. (And those fisheries are a form of primary wealth.)

I am not claiming to to be some great environmentalist; I'm not. On one hand, I don't own a car and I try not to use the dryer in my apartment building very much. On the other hand, my wife is from another country, thousands of miles away and every time we take a plane there we are creating climate damage that our grandchildren will have to deal with. According to climate expert James Hansen, our rapid climate disruption is likely to cause the sixth mass extinction since the advent of multicellular life 550 million years ago. I am not trying to make us all feel bad, but some check on the temptation to feel superior might be in order.

This isn't about feeling guilty, but I certainly don't feel superior or righteous either.

So, if we all do benefit disproportionally from some future increase in the value of gold, we might consider what we will do with that windfall. Because if things do go the way Chris, and most of the rest of us, predict, there will be a lot of hungry mouths to feed, and most likely a lot of refugees to protect from war and genocide*, so those of us who have the luxury of saving gold may consider to what extent it's really OURS and to what extent we just happened to be from a country with a lot of fossil fuel energy, a bit of which we were able to profit from, internalizing the profits and externalizing the costs (pollution, global warming), and then putting these profits into precious metals, which also entail toxic externalities.

Will we build walls around our small or large fortunes as civilization erodes, or will we open our wallets and our doors to the displaced and the destitute, the ones that burn 0.5 liters of oil per capita per day on average (India, Philippines) as opposed to 9.5 liters of oil per capita per day on average (USA)?

*See Jared Diamond's Collapse (the chapter on Rwanda) for the relationship between scarcity and genocide

HughK there are so many faulty premises in your envirinmental screed I don't know where to begin.

First of all, my reference to an "epic battle of good and evil" is really directed to the financial powers that be such as the too big to jail banks and the central banksters of the world. -- not ALL of the miners. To better and more fully understand what I mean read, "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin. The book describes all sorts of great evils perputuated by those who control the finacial levers of fiat money -- the evils include: the impovershmnet of many third world countries, starvation, killing babies via the promotion of abortion/population control and wars -- is that evil enogh for you?

I would also look into the Rolling Stone articles written by Matt Taibbi to judge for yourself if they are evil for you or not.

It is intellectually dishonest of you to make it seem like I am in favor of mining companies that do great damage to the environment. I am not! They should be prosecuted by the local authories and avoided as investments if they are in fact doing evil intentional great damage to the environment.

A correction... the miners are not the ones who do the most damage of removing wealth from poor nations -- some of them do -- instead it is the central banking cartel(s) enslaving the poor countries with fiat currency debts they cannot pay that does the MOST damage.

I'd be careful about wading too far into the so called envirnmental movement as it is well know front for communists agendas to control our planet using the cloak of environmentalism. Communism, you know, the ideology responsible for approximatly 100 Million deaths -- is that evil enough for you?

It always made me wonder about all the hoopla about the falsified hockey stick data theories of global warming and nothing has been done with the real envirnmental messes that should be cleaned up -- such as Love Canal, the southern tip of Lake Michigan as well as many others.

BTW, didn't the high priest of falsified global warming data, big Al Gore just recently sell current TV to Al Jezeera? You know, the Arabic Islamic BIG OIL people. What a HYPOCRITE!!!

Like I said, the so called envirnmental movement is full of errors and misdirections that lead us away from the true environmental problems.

Just take a nice long drive through farms and corn fields Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska and tell me there is a food and population problem. We have so much food we don't know what to do with it except subsidize it. Also during these drives I might not see anybody for several miles. Am I not to believe my lying eyes?

The problem is not the amount of food and population but the distribution of food via the system of fiat currency credits and debts controlled by the greedy banksters/governments of the world.

I would place my faith trust in God that says "Be fruitful and multiply" before I would give the time of day to the false prophets of environmental population control doom.

It's funny that you talk about feeling superior and all of that because the real superiority complex is found the false superiority of scientific secular humanism and the dictatorship of moral relativism that tries to redefine what is good and evil as if they are gods.

I am humble enough to recognize that we are not smarter than our wonderful loving God our creator. God who created us is in control -- in fact we may see just how much he is in control very soon!

We just have to be humble enough to trust in him as we work our ways through the mysteries of good and evil in this world.

Open your eyes and place your faith and trust in God, it'll reveal to you where the true evils of the world lie.

Hope that helps. God Bless! :^)

[Moderator's note: This user has been asked to review the section of the forum guidelines which prohibits religious discussions on these threads.]

Thanks for clarifying how you see things. I appreciate you taking the time to make your ideas clear.

We certainly share some common ground, such as the need to humbly work our ways through the mysteries of good and evil in this world.

I don't claim to be able to label what is good and what is evil quite as definitively as you do, as it seems to me that I am a complex mix of right and wrong, and so are most of the other people I know.

As an example of the complexity of good and evil, we can use al-Jazeera. Your description of the the Qatari TV station makes it sound as though you consider it to be evil. Yet even if they do some dishonest things (like most other TV stations I know) they also expose human rights violations in the Middle East. If I was an Afghani or an Iraqi unjustly imprisoned or killed by the U.S. military or Blackwater-type military contractors - and we know there are cases of injustices commited by our forces - then I would be very grateful to have a media source that reports on my plight, both for my own sake and to reduce the chance that it will happen again. That's one of the fundamental roles of the media.

Qataris donated $100 million dollars to the victims of and to the rebuilding for Hurricane Sandy. No matter what one thinks of their intentions, it seems that donating money to victims of a natural disaster must contain at least some good. I have a student from Qatar in one of my classes. His name is Talal. Talal is like all the rest of my students: a mix of generosity and selfishness, kindness and cruelty, wisdom and folly. That's what makes him like me: we're both human.